People often visit brick-and-mortar retail establishments on a daily basis, and often multiple times a day. Brick-and-mortar merchants, such as retail stores, grocery stores, department stores, malls, strip malls, etc., provide people (e.g., customers) with the ability to purchase a variety of products (e.g., goods and services). Even with the growth of e-commerce and the ability to purchase products online, consumers continue to purchase a significant amount of products from brick-and-mortar merchants.
Brick-and-mortar retail locations offer the ability for a merchant to interact with consumers face-to-face. For example, brick-and-mortar merchants often employ associates to make a sales pitch to consumers, answer consumer questions, or otherwise assist consumers within the brick-and-mortar location (e.g., locate a product, perform an inventory check, look up the price of an item, etc.). However, many conventional brick-and-mortar merchants struggle to efficiently provide a proper level of consumer support. For example, associates working at conventional brick-and-mortar merchants often spend significant amounts of time wandering the floor of a brick-and-mortar location without finding a consumer that needs assistance. In addition to the inefficient use of time for the associate, often times the associate causes the unintended effect of frustrating consumers by intruding or interfering with consumers that are not wanting assistance. Thus, conventional brick-and-mortar associate assistance models are often inefficient from a time and expense of associate employees, and furthermore, often cause a negative consumer impression.
From the perspective of a consumer, conventional brick-and-mortar merchants fail to provide assistance or support in the moment that the consumer wants the assistance (e.g., when the consumer has a question). For example, with conventional brick-and-mortar merchants, a consumer experience often involves the consumer not being able to locate any associates, resulting in the consumer resorting to physically searching the retail location to find an associate. Having to search for an associate generally frustrates consumers and leads to a negative consumer experience, or in some cases, the consumer may simply decide to leave without making a purchase they would have otherwise made if the consumer would have been able to speak to an associate.
Moreover, with conventional brick-and-mortar merchants, when a consumer is seeking a sales associate for assistance, the consumer often leaves the proximity of the product. As a result of leaving the proximity of the product, the likelihood of the consumer buying the product significantly decreases. In other cases, although the consumer may find an associate, the consumer may discover the associate is busy or otherwise engaged and cannot help. Furthermore, upon finding an associate, the consumer often learns that the particular associate is not knowledgeable in the relevant product area. Overall, the effort required for the consumer to obtain assistance within a conventional brick-and-mortar merchant is often inefficient and frustrating. In turn, the inability for conventional brick-and-mortar merchants to provide efficient and timely consumer support frequently results in a loss of sales for the merchant and increased dissatisfaction of consumers.
In addition to the challenge of providing efficient and timely assistance to consumers, another problem area that conventional brick-and-mortar merchants face is providing access to secured products (e.g., products protected within a locked display case, stored behind counters, or otherwise inaccessible to a consumer). Examples of secured products include items ranging from expensive products to popular items that are frequently stolen. With conventional brick-and-mortar merchants, consumers that want to purchase a secured product need the assistance of an associate to provide the consumer access to the secured product. Unfortunately, and as discussed above, conventional brick-and-mortar merchants often are not able to provide timely assistance when a consumer needs access to secured products. Accordingly, conventional brick-and-mortar merchants in essence create a large purchase barrier for consumers with respect to secured products, which results in a loss of sales for the merchant, and decreased consumer satisfaction.
Accordingly, these and other disadvantages exist with respect to conventional brick-and-mortar merchants.